A distributed storage system may include a plurality of storage devices (e.g., storage arrays) to provide data storage to a plurality of nodes. The plurality of storage devices and the plurality of nodes may be situated in the same physical location, or in one or more physically remote locations. The plurality of nodes may be coupled to the storage devices by a high-speed interconnect, such as a switch fabric.
In order to save space on the storage devices and/or to reduce data transferred by the interconnect, many storage systems may employ data compression. However, performing data compression can be computation-intensive, and reduce system performance by consuming system processing resources rather than increase system performance by reducing the size of stored and/or transferred data.